


Captain Jack Made It Look So Easy

by ishie



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Alternate Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-07
Updated: 2011-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-17 06:32:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/173935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With a frustrated grunt, Penny set to trying to free herself. After a minute of furious effort, she wound up on her stomach, breathing hard, with one side of her face jammed against a pillow.</p><p>"This is all your fault," she told Sheldon's stupid jar sitting on Sheldon's stupid dresser, Sheldon's stupid hand bobbing in the liquid inside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Captain Jack Made It Look So Easy

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt:** Hands touching hands, touching me, touching you (from Sweet Caroline) for the 2010 sheldon_penny Saturnalia exchange
> 
> Super-duper thankety-thanks to weasleytook for a) being awesome and b) being my beta ♥

After Raj cleared his throat for the sixth time, Leonard heaved a great sigh and put down his plate.

"Penny, we need to talk about this," he said. "This is... I mean, it's kind of, you know. It's—"

"It's weird!" Howard shouted, with an agitated gesture toward the coffee table between them. "I mean, come on. It's _weird_."

Raj nodded, frantic.

Penny didn't say anything. She just picked up her dinner plate and carried it into the kitchen without a word.

"Leonard, _do something_ ," Howard hissed.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I don't know!"

"Well, neither do I!"

"Hey," Penny said, stepping between them to grab the jar she'd left on the coffee table. "I know what all _three_ of you are gonna do if you don't leave me alone."

  
   
   
   
As the door slammed behind her, Raj shook his head. "I don't think that's physically possible. Is it?"

"Well, we're not going to find out, okay?" Leonard shot back. His hand was shaking, just enough to make the spaghetti noodles slide right off his fork when he tried to start eating again.

Howard was pale and sweating, still staring at the spot where Penny had disappeared down the hallway. "I don't even _know_ half those words," he marveled.

  
   
   
   
Penny sat the jar down on the dresser and threw herself on the bed.

 _I'm not going to kill anyone today_ , she told herself. _I'm not going to kill anyone today. No matter how annoying they are._

She wrestled with the comforter until she managed to wiggle herself under it, then burrowed into the soft pillows she'd mounded up against the headboard. Her hair had come loose at some point, falling in a tangled mess over her eyes, and her breath was hot on her own face inside the cocoon of bedclothes.

With a frustrated grunt, Penny set to trying to free herself. After a minute of furious effort, she wound up on her stomach, breathing hard, with one side of her face jammed against a pillow.

"This is all your fault," she told Sheldon's stupid jar sitting on Sheldon's stupid dresser, Sheldon's stupid hand bobbing in the liquid inside.

  
   
   
   
It wasn't like— Well, actually, Penny didn't know what it wasn't like. What it _was_ like was that she was living in Sheldon's old room, with Sheldon's hand in a jar for a roommate.

And Leonard, too. He kind of came with the apartment. Raj and Howard, too, especially since the accident. They'd all kind of decided that they were her protectors, or something. Between the three of them, they might be capable of protecting a housefly, but she wouldn't put any money on it.

But Penny was the last one to see Sheldon. When they found her, she was huddled on the floor of his bedroom, clutching his hand.

The rest of him was nowhere to be found.

What the _fuck_. How was this her life?

  
   
   
   
Penny passed out sometime after dark, letting the exhaustion sweep her into bright, neon-colored dreams about Robert Pattinson trying to steal her soul by making out with her. A lot.

When she woke, the first thing she saw was Sheldon's hand bubbling merrily away in its jar.

"I am going to kick every bit of the rest of you like it's my _job_ when you get back," she promised it.

The hand didn't so much as twitch.

  
   
   
   
Leonard was making clinking and clanking noises in the kitchen when Penny stumbled to the bathroom the next morning.

Her hair was even more of a mess, twisting itself into a total rats' nest at the back of her head, and her mascara was smeared halfway down her cheeks. Which meant she'd also have to wash Sheldon's bedding—again—because it would be all over his comforter too.

Penny made a face at herself in the mirror and turned on the shower, then dashed back to Sheldon's room to grab her shower stuff. She'd been living there for two months but she'd resisted doing anything that smacked of permanence, like bringing more than two changes of clothes or putting her shampoo in the shower.

She slung a smallish hand towel over the top of the jar before she started to undress. Sure, _technically_ , it wasn't like there were any eyes that could see her but getting naked in the same room as any part of Sheldon? No way, José. Things were already weird enough without adding that to the mix.

  
   
   
   
By the time she was dried and dressed and feeling halfway normal—halfway being about as normal as she got these days, with her neighbor's hand in a jar that was never far from her side—Leonard had already left for work. But there was a plate of scrambled eggs and toast with real butter waiting for her on the kitchen counter, under the glass dome Sheldon kept for fresh bananas.

And experiments with fruit flies, that one insanely long week when no one was allowed in the physics building because radiation, or something.

While she appreciated the thoughtful gesture, Penny liked to keep her food and her mad scientists as separate as possible.

"Not that you're _my_ mad scientist," she told the hand. "You know what I mean."

Yeah, it was really important to make that distinction to a _severed hand_.

Penny slumped down on the couch and bit into the apple she'd fished out of the crisper drawer.

"There's no place like home?" she asked the empty room, hoping that the seventy-fourth time might be the charm.

  
   
   
   
She was still on the couch when Leonard got home. It wasn't like she could go to work, not when she had to babysit the hand all day long.

He sat down at her feet and pushed up his glasses. Penny muted Dr. Oz and waited.

They had a kind of a routine, after almost a month of him tiptoeing around her, and another three weeks of her snapping at everything he said. Now, it was only every dozen things or so.

"Maybe we should start talking about what you're going to do long-term," he said without looking at her.

"Easy," she said, knowing it was anything but, "long-term I move back into my apartment and Sheldon annoys the shit out of you and everything's back the way it should be."

He didn't sigh, not out loud, but his shoulders sagged forward and he started rubbing his forehead like he was getting a migraine.

"What if he doesn't come back?" he asked.

It was the same question she'd been asking herself all along, but hearing it from someone else's mouth knocked the air right out of her lungs.

"He will," she said when she got her breath back. "He told me he would."

  
   
   
   
"Sheldon?"

"Penny? How did you get in my apartment?"

She rolls her eyes. He was the one who'd given her the replacement emergency key every single time he changed the locks on the door and insisted she use it rather than banging on the door any time she liked. ( _"What if I'm incapacitated by a home invader?"_ he squawked when she tried to refuse the first time. _"What if the element of surprise is all that stands between me and certain death?"_ Since when was she part of his designated brute squad anyway?)

Apparently the answer isn't important, or more likely he's already moved on to some other train of thought, because the next thing she hears is, "Well, that's not right."

It's not so much the words that grab her attention as the completely panicked tone he uses.

And the really loud buzzing whine that follows it.

Penny runs down the hall to his bedroom. The door, for a change, is wide-open and the first thing she sees is ... snow-covered mountains? What the hell?

"What the hell?"

At the sound of her voice, Sheldon whirls around. He's wearing one of the parkas he bought for the doomed Arctic expedition and an expression that hovers somewhere around the intersection of terrified and—if Penny didn't know better, she'd call it orgasmic.

Unfortunately, halfway through the whirl, Sheldon loses his balance and starts to teeter backward, toward the mountains that have somehow replaced his bedroom wall.

Penny leaps forward and grabs one of his flailing hands. She hauls back on him as hard as she can, but he's still falling away from her. She skids on the carpet and Sheldon twists his wrist inside her hold.

"I'll be right back," he says as the wall starts to come together again, blocking out part of the view.

"Sheldon, what—"

But the wall is closing too fast and he's on the wrong side of it, and he's turned his hand enough to press his palm against hers.

"I promise," is the last thing she hears before it closes completely, leaving her to fall to her knees in front of a blank wall, Sheldon's hand still pressed against hers.


End file.
